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Getting It Right: How Working Mothers Successfully Take Up the Challenge of Life, Family, and Career

Review

Getting It Right: How Working Mothers Successfully Take Up the Challenge of Life, Family, and Career



To her credit, Laraine T. Zappert, Ph.D., has included a litany of
experiences in GETTING IT RIGHT: How Working Mothers Successfully
Take Up the Challenge of Life, Family, and Career. In most books on
the subject, we are usually bombarded with the complete ability to
balance life and work and family from celebrities who have millions
of dollars, fleets of nannies, and stylists who save them from bad
hair days. Zappert talks to women from all walks of life, women who
have continued to work and thrive, women who have stayed home and
thrived, women who have gone back to work only to have great
difficulties at first, women who have stayed home and almost wasted
away from the cabin fever. Wherever you fit --- if you do --- into
these categories, you will find some great advice about how to make
the best of your choices.

The women who share their life stories here have been part of a
study at Stanford University in which Zappert examined the choices,
and consequences of those choices, of women who attended the
Graduate Business program at the school. The women went on to jobs
as varied as sales managers to CEOs. Some had difficulty with their
choices, others were committed to their choice from the moment they
found out that they were pregnant. The study affords Zappert the
opportunity to look at a wide spectrum of women professionals, whom
she refers to as Pioneers (those who graduated before 1976),
Successors (graduates between 1976 and 1985), or Settlers
(graduates from 1986 to 1995) --- it is her way of saying that the
balancing act she is talking about in this book is still something
of a brave new world, although women have been attempting it for
decades now. Zappert counts herself among those who are trying to
make it work, and her commitment to finding a way to help women
make good and realistic choices comes through with heart and
soul.

"The illusion that often exists is that other women are doing it
better. Other women are getting it right. They are managing to have
it all, with energy and spirit to spare. Yet the very fact that
such an illusion exists does a great disservice to those of us who
are striving to achieve the kind of life that we had hoped for when
we embarked on our professional careers...it is to address the
issues of excellence, balance and basic sanity for professional
women that this book is dedicated."

I think it is fair to say that Zappert has reached her goal here
with tremendous success. This is a book that any working mother
will find enlightening and helpful.

Reviewed by Jana Siciliano on January 22, 2011

Getting It Right: How Working Mothers Successfully Take Up the Challenge of Life, Family, and Career
by Laraine T. ZappertPh.D.

  • Publication Date: February 15, 2001
  • Genres: Nonfiction
  • Hardcover: 278 pages
  • Publisher: Atria
  • ISBN-10: 0671041800
  • ISBN-13: 9780671041809